"'Mrs Dod Procter's famous picture "Morning", shown at the 1927 Royal Academy was bought for the nation by the Daily Mail. The painting was exhibited in the United States and is making a tour of British art galleries before being finally lodged in the Tate Gallery.' The paper reported that, in Sheffield, the painting was inspected by 17,817 people during the four weeks it was on view'."
Procter's mother, shaped her daughter's career, moving the young Dod and her brother to Newlyn to study at Stanhope Forbes's school. While at Newlyn the young artist met other painters including Laura Knight, Harold, Gluck, and her husband, Ernest Procter. In 1910 mother and daughter went to the French capital so that Dod could study at the atelier Colarossi and see modem French art, and some of her earliest exhibited works were paintings of Paris and Versailles.
The art that made Procter famous during the 1920s is typified by Morning, with its simplified sculptural forms, cool colors and realistic, even austere depiction of a young woman. Her work has obvious parallels with contemporaries such as Meredith Frampton and Glyn Philpot, and also with Picasso's classical figuration. Procter's incisively drawn and subtle tonal paintings of female nudes include several of Eileen Mayo, who was also an artist, and who is seen in Model Resting of 1924 (Pyms Gallery, London), In a self-portrait (date unknown, private collection on loan to Penlee House, Penzance Museum and Art Gallery), Procter portrayed herself with modish bobbed hair, and wearing a scarf around her neck reminiscent of those worn by her friend Laura Knight in her self-portraits. The composition of the painting, with her face in sharp profile and strikingly lit, draws the viewer's attention to her intent and serious gaze.
Procter was sometimes criticised for what was perceived as an unfeminine, clinical hardness in her work. Following her great success at the 1927 Royal Academy exhibition, her 1929 submission Virginal, a painting of a young female nude holding a dove, was rejected, an event which was reported in the national press. Writing on 'Women as Artists' in May 1929, the critic of the Sheffield Telegraph complained, "there is at times something positively brutal in pictures by women, as if they were determined to prove that they can be as mannish as any man. This was so much the case with Mrs. Procter's nude.' He described another of her works as having 'almost a Robot strength in it'. A number of paintings of nudes accompanying the tour of Morning had also caused a controversy, and were deemed unsuitable for exhibition
By contrast, critics who admired Procter's work saw in it a successful fusion of two conflicting forms of art, as Anthony Bertram argued in the Studio in 1929: 'Although Mrs. Procter represents accurately, conforming to the foot-rule in which the academic mind takes so great a delight, she is essentially a modern painter Without Cubism Mrs., Procter could never have existed, or at least she could never have been the Mrs. Procter whom we know. Reviewing Procter's first solo show at the Leicester Galleries which opened in May 1932, the critic of the Nottingham Journal praised her 'versatility', and continued, 'Seen in a room by themselves the impression of cold severity that they usually convey disappears altogether'.
Procter had a series of solo shows in London at the Leicester Galleries. In America her work was seen at the Carnegie Institute's International Exhibition, Pittsburgh in 1928 and at the Carl Fischer Gallery, New York in 1935 and 1936. Her exhibiting record at the Royal Academy led to her being made an Associate in 1934 and Academician in 1942. She also had a number of joint shows with Ernest Procter, despite the difference between her work and his mythological and religious paintings. Their work was seen together in a joint exhibition which toured from Manchester City Art Gallery to venues including the New York liners Aquitania and Berengaria from 1927-9, and, more recently, in a show which was toured from the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 1990.
Procter did not limit her subject matter to Newlyn. In 1920 she had undertaken a commission with her husband to decorate the Kokine Palace in Rangoon, Burma, where working with Burmese, Indian and Chinese craftsmen introduced them to new forms of visual culture. Writing about the Procters' art in Apollo in 1927. Mary Chamot identified a possible effect of this visit in Dod Procter's predilection for rounded forms." In the 1940s and 1950s Procter visited Jamaica and Africa, and produced many portraits, such as African Head (Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery), a sensitive painting of a Masai child. On her travels Procter also undertook lucrative commissions to paint portraits of the British colonial establishment.
Two of Procter's flower paintings, made at different stages of her career, show her later development to a softly natural style. Bella Donna Lilies (MacConnell Mason Gallery, London), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1924, is hard-edged, stylish and modem, the clean, sculptural lines of the pink lilies set off by a background starkly divided into cream and dark ultramarine. By contrast, in Flowers on the Dresser, exhibited there twenty-four years later, soft blue paint describes a simple domestic arrangement, with a background of china cups. In the long series of letters which she wrote to her husband (Tate Archive), Procter's observation of the smallest details of the color and light of her surroundings in Newlyn is often the subject: "The sun has opened out all the red and white anemones [sic]; they stand up very straight and open themselves so wide that they look quite flat on the top...this white paper is beautifully bright, with the purple shadow of my hand across it's surface. |
